Public Cloud Data Centers

A public cloud is a shared-service environment accessible to any buyer. This option offers economies of scale, but concerns about security, privacy, trust and control limit mission-critical uses, according to Gartner. Public clouds are the most widely used option and work well for growing businesses that need immediate access to services to meet rapid increases in storage needs or computing demand. Programs like SalesForce and Dropbox are public cloud services.

Explaining Public Clouds

Public clouds are “stand-alone,” or proprietary, clouds mostly off-premise, run by third party companies such as Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and others. Public clouds are hosted off customer premises and usually mix applications (transparently) from different consumers on shared infrastructure. 

Delivery Models

The most common framework for cloud delivery models is the SPI model (Software, Platform, Infrastructure) in which cloud services are classified into three different delivery types:

● IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) - Shared infrastructure such as servers, storage and network are delivered as a service over the internet. Some examples include Amazon Web Services, Rackspace Cloud, etc. IaaS offers the most control to the users and generally the least security from the service provider. The users are expected to be responsible for ensuring the security of their cloud infrastructure as well as the applications built on top of them.

● PaaS (Platform as a Service) - Application development framework offered as a service to developers for quick deployment of their code. Some examples for PaaS include Google App Engine, Heroku, Cloud Foundry, etc. PaaS offers no control over the underlying infrastructure while offering some control over the applications and its configuration. While the provider takes care of the security of the underlying infrastructure, the developer is responsible for application security.

● SaaS (Software as a Service) - Application software offered as a service using a multi tenant model which can be consumed using web browsers. Some examples are Gmail, Salesforce, etc. With SaaS solutions, service providers are responsible for security because they control the infrastructure and applications. However, because service providers retain control, SaaS offers the customer very little visibility and customizability over the infrastructure underneath or even application configuration.

Public Cloud Use Cases

Businesses can take advantage of the cost benefits and elasticity of public clouds to their advantage. A video production company can use public clouds for video rendering and pay for only the time they used the resources. A business can tap into public clouds when they expect unpredictable demand during a marketing promotion. A pharmaceutical company can run their drug design processes on public cloud, thereby, accelerating the time to market. With proper security procedures, more and more workloads can be moved to the public clouds. In fact, public clouds easily match the private clouds with respect to availability and business continuity.

Conclusion

Public clouds offer tremendous value for businesses of all sizes across many different verticals. Even with stringent compliance requirement, businesses can take advantage of public cloud services to enjoy benefits such as better cost structure, business agility, etc. Public cloud services require a different set of security considerations to mitigate any potential risks, but by following security best practices such as self-defending virtual machines and encryption in cloud environments, data can be safely deployed into the public cloud. Hybrid and private clouds are considered in two other whitepapers where security considerations and solutions on these environments are discussed.

REFERENCES

SEI has a team of experts ready to service both internal cloud servers and co-location servers.

Krishnan Subramanian Analyst & Researcher Krishworld.com